and for long periods not at all, until Prohibition
came. Then I began doing as about ninety per cent of my fellow-adult
Americans began doing--which was to take a drink when the opportunity
offered. As I diagnose it, we nearly all are actuated now by much the same
instinct which causes a small boy to loot a jam closet. He doesn't
particularly want all that jam but he takes the jam because it is
summarily denied him and because he's afraid he may never again get a
whack at unlimited jam.

To my way of thinking, the main result of the effort drastically to
enforce Prohibition, aside from making us a nation of law-breakers,
law-evaders, sneaks, bribers, boot-leggers, bigots, corruptionists and
moral cowards, has been to transfer the burden of inebriety from one set
of shoulders to another set of shoulders. Men who formerly drank to
excess have sobered up, against their will, for lack of cash or lack of
chance to buy hard liquor. They cannot rake together enough coin to
purchase the adulterated stuff at ten times the price they had paid for
better liquor before the law went into effect. On the other hand, men--and
women--who formerly drank but little are now drinking to excess, some of
them being prompted, I think, by a feeling of protest against what they
regard as an invasion of their personal liberties and some, no doubt,
inspired by a perfectly understandable impulse to do a thing which is
forbidden when the doing of it gives them a sense of adventure and daring.

Far be it from an humble citizen to criticise our national law-making
body. Far be it from him, as he contemplates the spectacle frequently
presented under the dome of the Capitol at Washington, to paraphrase Ethan
Allen's celebrated remark when he took Fort Ticonderoga in the name of
Jehovah and the Continental fathers and exclaim: "Congress--oh, my God!"
Far be it, I repeat, from such a one to do such things as these. But I
trust I may be pardoned for venturing the statements that excessive
drinking already was going out of fashion in this country, that the
treating evil was in a fair way to die a natural death anyhow, and that
the present sumptuary attempt to cure us overnight of a habit which has
been ingrained in the very fibre of the race for so far back as the
history of the race runs, has only had the effect of making a bad thing
worse.

At that, I hold no brief for the brewer and the distiller. They got
exactly what was coming to them. Had they, as